Painting, Modelling and Gaming

Monthly Archives: May 2013

This past week has seen little emerging on the rumours front and indeed, today’s post is GW centric. Everyone is still excited about the new Warhammer 40k Eldar release and there’s been a lot of chatter about rules or possible rules or rules that we are hoping for regarding the Eldar but the codex drops in 3 days so it won’t be long until we find out. 🙂

The glaring omission from the Eldar lists in White Dwarf was the Iyanden Craftworld codex supplement that was shown in the digital releases section. This has now been mooted to be released on June 15th – so watch this space!

Sadly it does appear to be at full codex price, so it will be interesting to see how much you get for the money.

According to several sources the next WFB Army Book will be Lizardmen! So all you people that like your scaly men… err.. look no further! The consensus at the moment is that this release will appear in August.

That’s about it for this week. Games Workshop is possibly releasing Apocalypse 2 in July but more on that as we get it. The sources are being tapped where possible and we will uncover the truth! 😀

If you’ve been following on Twitter you’ll know that we’ve had a Realm of Battle board in the works for a while and as it’s now finished, we thought it was time we published a tutorial on how we painted it. I’m going to split it into two parts for sanity but hopefully you’ll find it useful for your own boards.

Step 1: Once unpacked and inspected for any damage, proceed to undercoat the board. We neglected to photograph this but to be honest, it’s just black spray paint. Now… I won’t lie, I used two and a half cans of GW Chaos Black undercoat! It is, hands down, my most expensive use of spray, ever. 🙂

Step2: I was lucky enough to get one of this GW Scenery Painting Packs from eBay for about £10 I think (RRP is about £25 I believe), so I’ve balanced out the pain of the undercoating costs! These packs actually aren’t too bad. They contain more PVA than you need, way more grass than you need, way more brown paint and ocre paint than you need and a nice big paint brush. Now, I’m not saying it’s worth £25 but it’s certainly worth the £10 I paid!

When the undercoat had completely dried, I got an old plastic tub, my brown paint and a decent sized piece of cardboard. I poured a little brown paint into the tub and dabbed the brush into it enough so that the bottom half of the bristles were nicely coated but not saturated with paint.

Then I wiped most of that paint off on the cardboard – much like you would do with kitchen roll if you were drybrushing a miniature – and then proceeded to paint the main earthy parts of the board. I deliberated left the rocky outcrops black at this stage. Now this is very similar to drybrushing but there is no magic formula I can really explain, but moderate pressure and fast sweeps was how I was trying to play it.

Step 3: Once this layer of brown had dried completely, I repeated this process with the Ocre colour that came in set. This time I used slightly less paint and less pressure as it’s supposed to be a highlight.

Step 4: Now it’s time to deal with the rocky parts! For this I go a slightly smaller brush – from the shed – but one that was bigger than the GW large drybrush and would happily take more of a battering. The colour was Eshin Grey and it was painted on in the same way as the brown but I was a little more liberal with the paint this time.

Steps 5 & 6: The next steps are to highlight those areas and for this I used the same brush as used for the Eshin Grey for the first highlight – Dawnstone – and then used a GW Large Drybrush to get the edges using Administratum Grey. It’s important to use less paint and be more subtle here. It will really lift these areas on the board if you don’t overcook it.

Thanks very much for reading, I hope you find some of this useful and please feel free to question or comment as you wish.

Today we’re sharing a great video from our friend Templars Crusade 01 – if you don’t know him, he is one of the outstanding YouTubers that shares modelling and painting tips and tutorials. He also does a lot of very useful product reviews. We find the videos helpful and his enthusiasm infectious! 🙂